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America's Colonial Era of Policing (1600–1840)
Renowned police historian Raymond B. Fosdick (1972), discussing the early beginning of police in America, acknowledged that their origin developed in colonial practices. Bailey (1989), addressing early American policing, wrote that “the earliest inhabitants of colonial cities in the seventeenth century still had one foot in the Middle Ages,” and that “their worldview was dominated by scarcity” (pp. 553–558). Addressing the then state of affairs, he explained that the government's preoccupation “was to regulate economic life so that strangers did not usurp work rightfully belonging to residents, or wandering poor gain the right to local relief, or greedy men take undue advantage of consumers.” He emphasized that “public officials did not think of government as a provider of services financed through the collection of taxes,” which included, among many things, the notion of having to finance others to provide policing services. Similar to other early communities where formal policing was nonexistent, in America's early days of colonization, “ordinary citizens played a major role in maintaining social control through informal means” (p. 556). Such informal controls were possible because communities were small, homogeneous, and “people shared the same basic values” (Walker & Katz, 2005, pp. 27–28). Similarly, Bailey (1989) wrote that “in the colonial period, order maintenance and crime-fighting were more individual and communal responsibilities than the purview of a bureaucratic agency” (p. 554). Over time, however, as English colonists increased in numbers and their communities grew and developed, the means for maintaining social order and control were influenced, to a great extent, by the “customs, laws, and law enforcement systems known in their native land” (Champion & Hooper, 2003, p. 74). While the positions and operational practices of the constable, the watch and ward system, and the sheriff served the interests of America's early pioneers, they “eventually acquired distinctive American features” as a consequence of the many changes the country was experiencing (Walker & Katz, pp. 27–28). One such feature, which according to Stevens (2003) was distinctively different from its English roots and practices in other European countries, was that “American society from the